19 Days Later
by fanfic n00b
Summary: It's been 19 days since Hermione, Ron, and Harry finished their quest. They're camped at the Burrow for the summer. Hermione ponders the future and the present.


The first thing she hears when she wakes is the rooster. She shuffles Ron's long limbs out of the way so she can see out the window. The sky is still inky, but lightening by degrees. She knows she won't be able to get back to sleep. Also, it's probably time to trade places with Harry.

They do this routine every evening and every morning: Ginny and Hermione go to bed in Ginny's room, Ron and Harry in Ron's. After half an hour, she and Harry get up and switch. In the morning, they switch back, pretending they've been there all night. She's fairly certain everyone knows about it, and normally they might be scandalized, but now, in the wake of the bloody, cathartic, terrible denouement they've just endured, nobody cares. However, it's a pleasant little charade. And she likes seeing Harry's face every morning.

Mostly they just sleep, anyway. Grieving is exhausting. By her last count, they have been to fourteen funerals in nineteen days. A heartbreaking ratio.

She gives Ron's sleeping face a kiss he will not remember and disentangles herself. She stuffs a pillow under his arm where her body was a moment ago. This way he'll sleep for hours more. She turns the doorknob soundlessly and walks down the hall.

Harry and Ginny sleep like wild animals. They've pushed the twin beds together and they're dozing in a mad pile of quilts, pillows, Quidditch magazines, crumbs, and clothes. Their limbs stick out improbably from the heap. He's wearing her slippers, which are shaped like huge, fuzzy Gryffindor lions.

She imagines the evening they must have had- joking and feeding each other chocolate biscuits and probably recounting play-by-plays of some Holyhead Harpies match- and she feels a surge of vicarious happiness.

Hermione tousles his black hair just above his scar. "Wake up, Harry."

He blinks up at her groggily.

"Someday," mutters Ginny, not taking her face off her pillow, "we can stop this absurd game of nocturnal musical chairs."

"Someday. Not today," yawns Harry, who is really the only one insisting on this arrangement, out of some sort of chivalry. He gets up and puts on a bathrobe.

Hermione wriggles herself under the blanket, her feet finding the warm pockets Harry left, deciding that maybe it is too early after all. Although it's June, her toes are perpetually cold. Her ankle brushes something that is quite possibly a sugar quill.

"Give Ron our love," says Ginny into her pillow, as Harry closes the door. They hear his lion-slippered feet padding down the hallway.

For a few minutes, she and Ginny lay prone and silent, as if hit by a full-body bind jinx. The rooster crows again. Hermione digs around for more blanket and comes up short.

"You two never make the bed, do you?" she asks.

"And I suppose Ron does?"

"Sadly, no. I'm going to spend the summer with very chilly extremities."

At these words, unwelcome memories return to her: a freezing tent in the forest. Ron, splinched, bleeding. Harry and Ron arguing. Ron disapparating in the rain. But she pushes these thoughts away. Soon she will have the faculties to digest all that happened this year. For now, she only wants to remember one thing: it's over.

The rooster crows a third time, and the hens cluck in answer.

Ginny groans. "Oh, sod it. Let's put the kettle on."

When they come downstairs, Molly Weasley is asleep on the sofa. Tonks' mother, Andromeda, is sleeping in an armchair. It looks as though they were up talking late into the night. A few cups of cold tea still hover beside them. Between them, Harry's new godson Teddy Lupin floats above the ground in an enchanted bassinet. He's awake, making soft baby noises. His hair is blonde, and in the dim light it's hard to tell, but it may be turning orange.

Not wanting to wake the whole house, Hermione casts a silencing charm on the kettle. Sleep is hard enough to come by. Even Ron, normally a fairly solid sleeper, sometimes wakes from nightmares, calling out incoherent phrases, sweating. When she has her own nightmares, or just her own obsessive, sleepless thoughts, he is a comfort. Also, he is very good with babies, which she learned two weeks ago when Teddy and his grandmother came to stay. "Always the tone of surprise," he had said, as the baby, who had been crying a moment before, became perfectly serene at his touch.

Ginny scoops Teddy up and holds him on her lap while slathering butter on her toast and dumping sugar into her tea. She has the thing too- the good-with-babies thing. Definitely a Weasley gift. Although Hermione is sure there is an empirical reason why.

"It'll be strange, going back to school when half the teachers are- well. Not going to be there."

"Yes, I've been wondering about that," says Hermione.

"No Snape. Although, I don't know what to make of that one anymore."

"Nor I. Obviously, yes, he wasn't a pleasant person, but I mean. _Snape. _Who could have guessed what he was up to all that time?"

"All down to Harry's mum. She must have been something."

"She must have. When Harry had that Prince book, I sometimes wondered... I'm surprised there wasn't anything about her in there, in fact."

"He'd have taken it out. Erased it. Not the sentimental type."

"Actually- I think he was the _most _sentimental type. Out of everyone." They both frown at this preposterous fact.

"Mental."

"Yes."

Hermione glances at the clock on the wall. No one's clock hands are pointing to "mortal peril" anymore. And it's time to feed the chickens.

Rising from the table, Hermione takes Teddy in her arms and turns him to face outward. She's noticed that he prefers this- to watch the world go by. An only child, Hermione had never held a baby until a few weeks ago. She was a little afraid of dropping him. Now, though, she can't get enough of it. It's an excellent antidote to this awful summer of mourning. She takes a deep inhale of baby smell – powder and lavender. And -it's certainly her imagination, it can't be- but there is just a whiff of something Lupin-ish.

She pushes open the back door.

"I want to come with you. To Australia. To fetch your parents," says Ginny, pulling on her Wellington boots.

Normally, Hermione might protest. But then, Ginny is of age. Their trio has become a quartet in the last three weeks. They often were in summers past, when they played two-a-side Quidditch on borrowed brooms, but now it seems decided. Official.

"Alright," Hermione says, as a large, brown bantam pecks at the grass in front of her.

The baby burbles at the chickens. Ginny and Hermione laugh.

They take the baby for a turn around the garden. Gnomes are stirring under the tall, precariously staked tomatoes. The sun is coming up. Teddy's hair is bright blue.

"He's so well-behaved," says Hermione.

"That's because he has seven mums," says Ginny.

Hermione lifts an eyebrow. Then she counts on her fingers. "Molly, Andromeda-"

"You, me, Fleur, Luna. And Tonks," says Ginny, a little sadly, holding up seven fingers.

Hermione considers this. "I suppose so. I've been thinking he's like Harry- you know, without – well, parents. But he isn't."

"Nah, he's got seven mums, a godfather, and my Dad and brothers to boot."

Her memory stirs. _Isn't seven the most powerfully magical number?_ She pushes it away.

And Ginny is right. Since he arrived, Teddy has been carried around, kissed, and cooed over by everyone at the Burrow. She herself reads to him from Beadle the Bard. Percy reads him the paper. Mr. Weasley takes him to the henhouse to look at his collection of batteries when he thinks no one is looking. Pass-the-baby. A much better game, she muses, than pass-the-horcrux. Or find-the-horcrux.

Hermione wonders if this is what their lives will be now- grief and healing. Toast and babies. Surely not _just_ those things. She's going back to school to take her N.E.W.T.s, and afterward, there will be something else meaningful to do. Not saving the world in exactly the way she, Ron, and Harry just finished doing, but in some other, subtler way.

But first, Australia. She wonders if Crookshanks is waiting for her on some Antipodean doorstep, counting the days until her arrival. He is a very clever cat.

The two women turn from the garden and walk back to the house. Other morning birds have joined the chorus of tutting chickens. It's time to get on with things.


End file.
